Project Ideas Needed: Environmental Science with Arduino or Raspberry Pi

I'm an agnostic on environmentalism.  People shouldn't make messes, sure.  But my deepening paranoia leads me to suspect that it has propaganda value, blaming the many for the decisions of the few.  My kids, however have sipped from the urn of this particular cool-aid. 

My older son's grad work had some sponsorship by the EPA.  The plan was to develop a cheap an rugged-ized GCMS with a little sampler an radio set.  The original plan was to sample all of the rivers in the US in real time and relay anomalies to satellites.  An automatic system was to be set up to contact local law enforcement to nail dumpers in the act.  Funding was withdrawn.  Wars ain't cheap.  Now he helps with earthquake preparedness as an RF proposition in his free time.  He works to develop and maintain and fund-raise for and train people to operate analog and digital HF rigs (and get the feds to plan to listen) to use if/when cell phone fails in a public crisis and the protocols around their allocation. 

My younger son is conducting some research with public and private money in his free time.  He works on and researches strains of fungus that eat petroleum that has been released to the environment unintentionally.  His specialties are probability theory and computer database.  His goal is to vet these organisms in vivo/vitro at different temperatures, humidities and salinity levels, molecular weights/types of sample, et c.so that appropriate samples can be stored pre-need at vulnerable sites, ready for deployment by local personnel.  He wants to grow some of it in calorimeters with measured amounts of input to gauge thermodynamic efficiency of his various strains versus nutrient and load.  An aerobic calorimeter seems to be no mean feat!  Basically, though, the technique works in that he can demonstrate the ability to remove motor oil (and most organics, AFIK) from things like straw and dirt more cheaply and thoroughly than mechanical or chemical methods.

I live in an area that is strictly residential for miles and miles around embedded in a matrix of exclusively industrial farming.  If I lived in a town that had some sort of hazardous facility, monitoring it from the outside might be interesting.

Hi Wade,

Since camps are short, and High School kids are not normally experienced embedded programmers, you may want to break up into two groups, one to set up a Linux LAMP HTML server using the Raspberry PI, and another reading various sensors from the Arduinos.  The Raspberry Pi org and The MagPi magazine along with this site and https://www.sparkfun.com/ can give you hundreds of project ideas.

Scott

Thanks to everyone for their input, we will definitely be looking into some of these resources for the coming year. Recently, we have been working on something a bit different in addition to the sensors. We have a team of students who are building an ROV (remotely operated vehicle) who are looking to expand their control of the vehicle's motors via an arduino. We have begun to explore this control and have made significant progress, but aren't completely there yet and would love any additional input or resources.  We'll also be looking into adding some sensors to the vehicle at some point!

Current state of progress:

We have played around with using a Sabertooth motor driver along with the Arduino to control the motors, using a small joystick button for the control. We have successfully gotten one motor to run with the controls correctly using this set up, but have run into some trouble coding the second motor commands to run simultaneously using the same control boards. 

We also ran into a technical problem after some time with the computer- something along the lines of "unplug the USB device that is drawing too much power" and were unable to reconnect our Arduino via USB to that particular computer after that notification popped up. Any input on this issue would also be great- we are unsure if it will be a recurring problem, but definitely don't want to keep getting stuck while building if it does continue to happen.

it sounds like your powering the motors from the USB as well as the controller, this is a bad idea

Power the motors separately to ensure you don't overload the USB or the Controller supply

this should eliminate the message your getting

Also

Check the motor controller board for the minimum voltage.

Sometimes its 7.5 or 9v.

Mark